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When cancers are treated with drugs designed to hit them right where it hurts, the effects are often remarkable but fleeting.

“What’s been shown by others is that, in a relatively short amount of time, cancers become resistant to drugs, particularly targeted therapies,” said Kris Wood of Duke University Medical Center. “While we do not yet have a comprehensive understanding of how cancers become resistant, an emerging theme is that they do so by activating signaling pathways controlling properties like growth, survival, and differentiation.”

This post was contributed by guest blogger Tessa Cressey.

The highly pathogenic Ebola virus belongs to the group of nonsegmented negative sense RNA viruses, along with other viruses that cause disease in humans such as measles, mumps, and rabies. Research on Ebola virus has been limited, in part, due to the necessity for working with this virus under the highest biosafety level conditions, BSL-4. In this regard, minigenome systems, such as the one developed for Zaire ebolavirus (EBOV) are extremely useful, allowing researchers to study aspects of the EBOV replication cycle under BSL-2 conditions (4).

Have you ever been reading a paper and thought to yourself, “Oh! This plasmid would be perfect for my next experiment!” but were unable to find the plasmid at Addgene? Well, we’re here to help with our Suggest a Plasmid Campaign.

The day has arrived; you’ve painstakingly cared for your packaging cell line, prepped your DNA, transfected and harvested your lentivirus. Now it’s time to move ahead with your infection and make your stable cell line. While we’ve all experienced the pressure to move a project forward, transductions should not be rushed into. Before you start any transduction, you should always titer your virus - that is determine the amount of virus you actually have in your prep. Taking time to properly titer your virus will not only ensure that your infection is designed in the best possible way but it may also save you time in the long run. Read on for an overview of the titering options and the benefits and drawbacks of different methods (for comprehensive protocols for all of the methods discussed here refer to Kutner et. al.).

With many interesting articles coming out in a myriad of journals every week, it can sometimes be difficult for great work to gain prominence among all the noise. Scientists have a variety of metrics they can use to evaluate the impact of their work (H-index for instance), but these rely upon other researchers being able to find their publications in the first place. As a curator of the thousands of amazing plasmid technologies contributed by our depositors, Addgene strives to make it easier for you to find the plasmids and publications relevant to your research interests. We do this by promoting citation, supporting sophisticated search, and curating plasmid collections.